Queen Elizabeth II

La Betty was staring at a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. The portrait was enormous, set in an elaborately carved frame. The frame was as imposing as a fortress. Its ornamental carvings featured voluptuous roses, curvaceous ferns, dainty butterflies and the waves of an ocean. All these forms were immobilized under a layer of gold leaf. Queen Elizabeth II’s portrait conveyed to La Betty the pinnacle of happiness; the portrait displayed royalty as thoroughly superficial, a magnificent surface. La Betty considered naturalism, realism, super realism, hyperrealism and magical realism vulgar, especially for images of royalty, super stars and elite athletes. Not that La Betty was familiar with these art school terms. La Betty had intuitively defined what to her would be “the essence of eminence:” a flat image with background, middle ground and foreground collapsed onto one shallow plane.

The colour pink, the most trivial of colours, dominated this image of Queen Elizabeth II. Queen Elizabeth II’s gown was tinted pink. There was barely a distinction between the intense pink backdrop and Queen Elizabeth II’s intensely pink hair. The few faux shadows were pink. To complete the illusion Queen Elizabeth II’s visage was an ovoid surface without contour. As if they were stickers her eyes, lips and gold earrings were set on the plane of Queen Elizabeth II’s white face. This magnificent regal figment was the highlight of La Betty’s brain.

La Betty was happy in the knowledge that, as she said to herself,

Queen Elizabeth II is a nobody. She is the perfection of Nobodyness. We see her tiara, her blue satin sash, her elaborate gold necklace, but her face is as it should be, expressionless, revealing nothing. There is nothing to be revealed. What luxury! What a stupendous fate! All we can say about her portrait is that it always looks like Queen Elizabeth II under gold crowns encrusted with the emeralds, rubies and diamonds of the realm. She must be Queen Elizabeth II because the animal fur she wears is hundred-year old feral ermine. She is depicted with a diamond ring that is bigger and brighter than the morning star. The outside of Queen Elizabeth II is so glamorous and grand there’s no room for an inside. To inhabit such an image is worth more than The Koh-I-Noor diamond which, if she commands, will be presented to her on a purple velvet pillow.

La Betty felt heavenly as she savoured how shallow Queen Elizabeth II could be whenever she wished --- and especially when duty called.

La Betty got distracted by a tiny pearl button that rolled along the floor. La Betty instantly discerned it was not mere cultured pearl; its wild gloss was unmistakable. La Betty didn’t recognize its origin; she had no idea what article of clothing it had fallen from. When La Betty leaned down to pick it up it wasn’t a pearl button after all. It was a wee white noggin atop a slimy white tail. The noggin was pearlescent and bald. The shiny slimy tail began where there is usually a neck. This was not a natural species obviously. A bulb on a thread, it rolled along as cranium and tail without a torso. There were two thick-lidded globular blue eyes on the head, and a small round orifice that was probably a mouth.

“I need my big silver-handle magnifying glass,” La Betty thought, “It’s more powerful than the little pearl handle one.” Then the white creature spoke words that were so astounding La Betty forgot the magnifying glasses. And she recognized exactly what was about to happen. She was beset again by yet another perverse interruption, another fiend inveigling her to forsake shopping. This was another ugly phantasm trying to rot La Betty’s resolve. La Betty would have liked to squish it but the best she could do was hold her hands over her ears while the infidel squeaked,

Queen Elizabeth II has skin. It is very white, revealing blue veins flowing like Lilliputian tributaries toward her heart. Queen Elizabeth II may cover almost all of the skin, yet it is there under hosiery, gloves, high collars and long sleeves. Her face however is always exposed. Queen Elizabeth II does not care, but take a look, La Betty.
Queen Elizabeth II’s nose is like a mongoose all but lost in ninety-one-year old furrows.

Her very own skin proves Queen Elizabeth II is not a nobody.
Truthfully she is just another someone. She is after all a mammal and so are you.